The first step in SQL Server performance tuning usually starts with finding bottleneck at the server side. It includes monitoring to some suspicious symptoms on CPU, Memory, Disk, and various SQL Server counter. Yes, Performance Monitor tool is already available on Windows machine. It is a very valuable tool for detecting the server bottleneck, and it is free. Just type perfmon and we are ready to start to do monitoring.

Usually I create counter log and let the monitoring runs at the background based on specific schedule and sampling interval. With this way, I can minimize the performance impact by running Perfmon inside the box. Once I got the log data, then I am ready to start the analysis. There are thousands or even millions rows of logs inside. How do I analyze and finding the system behavior, detect the pattern and plan a possible actions? Obviously I can import the CSV log file to SQL table or Excel and then use my T-SQL knowledge to summarize the data. But actually there is easier way to do it, Clint Huffman of Microsoft already created PAL.

The PAL does query to the counter log data using Log Parser, and display it in a nice HTML format. It is a graphical chart data analysis, so that’s why PAL requires Office Web Component installed to view the report. We can download PAL from CodePlex, and don’t forget to install Log Parser and OWC11 as pre-requisites. So the steps to do analysis with PAL are:

• Collect counter log data with Perfmon
• Use counter log as input to PAL
• Analyze the report with PAL

The first screen of PAL will ask a location of counter log file that was created by Perfmon.

At the next screen, there are several options of system monitoring template. It depends of what kind of servers installed in the system.

The good things is PAL already comes with predefined template and threshold, so we do not need to think about the threshold for various counter. We con modify this template as well to suit our needs.

Here are several reports generated by PAL, very nice analysis with graphical trends.

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I was in the situation when I had to modify some reports, but I did not have the source code (RDL) files on hand. I tried to go to SSRS server, and looking for download or save-as menu. I was expecting there are some ways to download the report definition so I can modify it under Visual Studio.

Unfortunately not, there is no built-in features in SSRS that for download or extract report from the server. Once deployed, it is there forever. I just thought to create small application using SSRS web services or API to extract the definition. But I was lucky enough that Jasper Smith created an amazing tool for this purpose.

I downloaded the RSScripter and install it on my machine. It can connect to both SQL 2000 and 2005, and generate the RDL, user, roles, and also the data source. This free tool is really fantastic.

I can also use this stuff to transfer the SSRS content from one server to another. A very good toolkit for server migration and deployment. The configuration is under option button, specify to transfer and as well as destination server.

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